Rikki Ducornet

In The Stain Rikki Ducornet tells the story of a young girl named Charlotte, branded with a furry birthmark in the shape of a dancing hare, regarded as the mark of Satan. "Sadistic nuns, scatology, butchered animals, monkish rapists, and Satan" (Kirkus), as well as the village exorcist, inhabit this bawdy tale of perversion, power, possession, and the rape of innocence. Ducornet weaves an intricate design of fantasy and reality, at once surreal, hilarious, and terrifying.

A Novel

The Stain

From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth universe. Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner Mic pilots their Wobble and entertains himself exploring his records of the obliterated planet Earth, searching for Al Pacino trivia, unfamiliar recipes, and high fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space towards an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik.

Trafik

A lyrical exploration of memory and imagination. "My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind." Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through story-telling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination.

The Fountains of Neptune

After her mother abandons her family to become a prostitute, a young girl begins to study the ancient art of fragrance under the tutelage of a master, learning how to resurrect scents from the past. Reprint.

Gazelle

Rikki Ducornet's boldest imaginative act yet-a brilliant novel about the Marquis de Sade that will forever change the way we regard one of history's most notorious men. Picture a dramatic courtroom scene: during the French Revolution a fan-maker is on trial because of a manuscript seized in her rooms and her friendship with the Marquis de Sade, the notorious author of Justine, who has already been condemned and imprisoned by the same court for his sexual transgressions. Not only has she made exquisite and sexually provocative fans for her friend, but she has also coauthored with the Marquis a book about the infamous Spanish missionary, Bishop Landa, accusing him of massacres and other hideous abuses against the native population of the New World. The men of the court are so consumed with punishing the authors of this scandalous book that they are blinded to the folly of their own accusations against the Marquis. The Fan-Maker's Inquisition is a novel about books and the reveries that enger them, about the intrinsic necessity of the sovereign imagination, and about the risks of passionate living and thinking.

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

Continues the author's "Tetrology of the Elements" with an air-themed novel set in Victorian England

The Jade Cabinet

The Cult of Seizure is a work of lyrical mesmerism and animal magnetism from acclaimed novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, which displays a lush poesis and visionary soul. Jane Urquhart describes it as a "combination of the bestial and the bestiary; of terror and of tenderness." Although an earlier work it contains all the evocative tapestries of her finest novels.

The Cult of Seizure

This novel of a troubled life lived on the fringes of a college campus “casts a lingering spell” (The New York Times). A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails, and homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, and Asthma, who enchants him, and all is found, then lost. From “one of the most interesting American writers around” (The Nation), this is a fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, and emotional deformity. “Anchors its charming caprice, philosophical fancy, and thriller-like pace to the psychological horror that lurks just beyond childhood innocence.” —Publishers Weekly “Vivid imagery, beautiful language, heartbreaking characters, and the striking perspective of an emotionally stunted man in a carefully controlled society…unique and captivating.” —Booklist “Brimming with lyrical descriptions of the campus and with ornamental characters representing various academic ‘types,’ Brightfellow is both a portrait of small town American campus life and of the peculiarities of childhood.” —Manhattan Book Review

Brightfellow

"A fan is like the thighs of a woman: it opens and closes". And so begins this lush historical novel -- a mixture of imagination and conceit, passion and suspense. In a tense courtroom during the French Revolution, a young fan-maker, renowned all over Paris for her sensual and graphic objets d'art, is on trial because of her collaboration with the Marquis de Sade. Heads will roll unless the independent fan-maker, erotically cast in the shadow of de Sade, can justify her art and friendships to a court known for its rigid and prudish proprieties. . . .

A Novel of the Marquis de Sade

With the great Renaissance voyages to the New World came the popularity of Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonders, in which newly discovered monsters and marvels could be displayed. Like such a cabinet, this collection of essays surveys the monstrous and the marvelous—as transmuted in the alembic of Rikki Ducornet's open-hearted vision—in literature, art and film. For her, excess anomaly, and heterodoxy entice the imagining mind to embrace "otherness," enlarge the world and regenerate Eden.

The Monstrous and the Marvelous

A compendium of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist's essays explores such topics as dreams, fairy tales and the role of art in rendering abstract concepts visible. Original.

The Deep Zoo

This startling and brilliantly comic novel tells the stories of two men: a father and his estranged son. Lamprias de Bergerac is a gentle mystic and amateur botanist who spends his middle-aged years in an erotic utopia deep in the Amazonian jungle, collecting specimens of rare orchids and ultimately finding Cucla, the young and free-spirited native woman who has become the love of his life. Meanwhile, his demented son Septimus is raised by his mother in prewar Europe, seething with hatred of the father who abandoned him. He rises to power in Nazi-occupied France, where he goes mad in an obsessive pursuit of racial purity. Rikki Ducornet has a gift for combining the horrific with the hilarious, the realistic with the fantastic. Through a wildly inventive narrative, Entering Fire scrutinizes the sources of fascist mentality in nations and, potentially, in all humans.

Entering Fire

“The veteran Port Townsend author explores love, violence, dreams, fairy tales and other things in her collection of essays.” ―The Seattle Times Within the writer’s life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early Egyptian scribe the monarch butterfly that metamorphosed into the Key of Life. Rikki Ducornet names these powers The Deep Zoo. Her essays take us from the glorious bestiary of Aloys Zötl to Abu Ghraib, from the tree of life to Sade’s Silling Castle, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to virtual reality. Says Ducornet, “To write with the irresistible ink of tigers and the uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time.” “Ducornet’s skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold.” —Star Tribune “This collection of essays meditates on art, mysticism, and more; it’ll leave a reader with plenty to ponder.” —Vol. 1 Brooklyn “Rikki Ducornet is imagination’s emissary to this mundane world.” —Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park “This book is like the secret at the heart of the world; I’ve put other books aside.” —Anne Germanacos, author of Tribute

Essays

This captivating descent into a psychoanalyst’s troubled, erotic, and harrowing inner world “tenaciously plums the tension between impulse and restraint” (American Book Review). Ruled by his hunger for erotic encounters, a deeply wounded psychoanalyst seduces both patients and strangers with equal heat. Driven to compartmentalize his life, the doctor attempts to order and contain his lovers as he does his collection of rare netsuke, the precious miniature sculptures gifted to him by his wife. This riveting exploration of one psychoanalyst’s abuse of power unearths the startling introspection present within even the darkest heart. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ducornet has fashioned a brilliant novel “as fascinating as it is dirty and dark,” where “sex and psychosis are indistinguishable” and “the plot is impossible to resist” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.” —New York Times “An unflinching meditation on the twinned drives of lust and destruction . . . Ducornet makes her characters real and scary beneath the ruminative, quietly observant prose. Highly recommended for literate readers.” —Library Journal “An enticing, fast-moving exploration of one man’s obsession with his calculated power and unhinged desires.” —Booklist “This story has some fascinating insights and noholds-barred language.” —New York Journal of Books “It has important things to say, embedded in the deadly beautiful prose. . . . Readers owe it to themselves to encounter this slim but complex novel on its own terms.” —Jeff Vandermeer

Netsuke

Jonathan Lethem

Steve Almond

Mary Ruefle

Edward Carey

Daniel Wallace

Caitlin Horrocks

Matthew Zapruder

Dean Young

Paul Lisicky

V. V. Ganeshananthan

Donald Revell

Tomaz Salamun

John Hilgart

Literary fiction with elements of the fantastic, the futuristic, the surreal, and the strange.

Unstuck

"My sleep began in the spring of 1914. I slept through both World Wars and the tainted calm between. It was as if I had been cursed by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind."Thus begins Rikki Ducornet's brilliant lyric novel about Nicolas who, as a result of witnessing his mother's murder, falls into a decades-long coma. Awakened in a seaport town in France, he reconstructs his past through storytelling and myth, resulting in an astonishing exploration of memory and imagination.

Continues the author's Tetrology of the Elements with an air-themed novel set in Victorian England.

Rikki

Contains fourteen essays in which author Rikki Ducornet surveys the monstrous and the marvelous in literature, art, and film.

From Algeria to Egypt to Italy to France, these stories range across many centuries and cultures and all demonstrate time and again why Rikki Ducornet has been called "one of the most interesting American writers around" (Nation). A madman recalls his first erotic encounter, a priest loses sleep over a heretic, a scholar searches for the anomaly that inspired the Hindu divinities, a spinster hallucinates her own seductions, a pope suckles a wet nurse. Erotic and fiercely funny, these stories range across many centuries and cultures, from Algeria to Egypt to Italy to France, and all demonstrate time and again why Rikki Ducornet has been called "one of the most interesting American writers around" (Nation).

The Word "Desire"

In the fantastic tradition of Borges, Bruno Schulz, Angela Carter, and H. P. Lovecraft, here are nearly sixty unforgettable stories that ignore the confines of space and time to offer, among other times and places: a cabinet of curiosities in contemporary Cairo, an alvhemical ceiling in 18th-century Naples, the hallucinatory inner worlds of psychotics, anthropomorphic planets, and an Old West ruled by necromancy.This expanded, revised edition collects the complete short stories of one of the most immaginative writers of our time.

Rikki Ducornet

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